Why SWTOR Early Access Was Just Awful

History Repeats Itself With Shadow Of Revan Early Access Repeats History

I don’t even know what to say about this.

I really didn’t want to QQ about SWTOR again. I was finally starting to get excited about early release and the expansion. Bioware made sure my excitement didn’t last long. The last few ‘early release’ periods have had their share of problems. Things went downhill almost from the beginning. Deja vu all over again.

Repeated Problems With Early Access

I saw someone complaining in guild chat about the level 60 queues not popping a few days after early access started. It took me back to the launch of GSF. Only subscribers had early access for the first month, so I ponied up my $15. After two weeks the queues took a nose dive, and it was pretty much like not having early access. The point of paying money is to get something in return. This poor guild mate got something alright. He got to wait, just like I did back during the GSF launch. Why on earth would you incentivize someone to pay money early, knowing their options at max level are going to be limited? Bioware has said time and again they are amazed at how fast players chew through content. Three years and four expansions later, and it’s still a surprise to them. It’s like that scene in Elf, where Buddy is testing all the jack in the boxes. Every time it pops out, it still scares him.

Players Pay Double For Early Access

And this part really pissed me off. Right before the weekend hit, Bioware announced that all skill training costs would be removed with the next patch. Just as soon as early access ended. If you only count training skills from 55-60, that’s over 500,000 credits. Per character.And the only people that had to pay that 500k+ were the suckers first in line to hand Bioware their money. Or you could just level 55 to 60, and not train anything the entire weekend. Yeah. Bet that’d be fun. You slapped a $20 bill in their hand before they could hardly ask for it, and got a 500k+ credit bill in game for your trouble. But that was unfortunately not the end of it.

The Bugs, OH The Bugs

Players were told they only needed to finish Chapter 3 of their story quest to be able to begin Shadow of Revan. Instead, the entire Forged Alliances story arc was also required. On top of that gem, some people got their questline reset to the beginning. Thankfully, Bioware provided a GSI droid to let you do the Flashpoints in solo mode. Well, that would have been awesome, except it bugged for a lot of people too. If you finally made it to Rishi, the very first planet, you were greeted once more with bugs that prevented you from completing quests. Once more, all these bugs were fixed as soon as early access ended.

Paying Customers Unwelcome In SWTOR

Early access has been a raw deal for SWTOR players repeatedly. GSF was not supposed to receive any changes in 3.0, but that apparently doesn’t mean you can’t screw it up. Nearly every top tier talent is broken, and Bioware has no timeframe for a fix. Imagine logging into your character, and you don’t have access to top level abilities. Even something as simple as loading screen text is bugged. See above picture for an example. Regular warzone load screens are garbled, and they weren’t receiving any updates either. I could dig into a few examples from the Strongholds release, but I won’t. I think you’ve read enough. The funny part is, the people who did not pay in advance will miss 90% of this nonsense. And they’ll have more credits too. Having subscribed myself back in October, I’m very annoyed about essentially paying to give Bioware some free QA for their expansion. I’m going to try to stop writing about SWTOR stuff for a little while. I just want to enjoy the game, but it seems Bioware is determined to make the experience as unpleasant as possible. And they want me to pay them to do it.